Robert Fulford: When a kind of intimacy happens, biography becomes a literary art

James Atlas, the author of two much-noted biographies, has thrown a fresh light on the writing of lives in his thoughtful book, The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale (Pantheon).

In the 1970s, Atlas was working on a biography of the talented poet Delmore Schwartz, a star of the New York intelligentsia until alcoholism and mental illness led to his decline and death at age 52. It turned out that Saul Bellow, a friend of Schwartz, was also thinking about him and borrowed his sad story for the title character in Humboldt’s Gift, a prize-winning 1975 novel. It seemed only natural that Atlas should next write Bellow: A Biography, the first book on the life of the writer, who received the Nobel Prize in 1976.

Atlas pays tribute to the history of biography, noting Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans in antiquity, The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell, Richard Ellmann’s magnificent book on James Joyce and the studies of romantic poets by the universally praised contemporary author Richard Holmes.

For Atlas, the art of biography can never be a marginal pursuit. In his view, the best biographies become part of the core of literature. They last for generations and embody not only an account of one life but also the history of an era and a view of human behaviour.

Atlas has learned from experience that friends, relatives and colleagues of authors are not to be trusted. He’s had sources who knowingly exaggerate or lie, but perhaps those are less dangerous than the friends who somehow innocently remember events that never occurred, a common phenomenon. Someone being interviewed by a biographer may well be working on his or her own reputation. They may prize above all their connections to the subject.

But the harshest lesson Atlas has learned came out of his relations to Bellow. The subject of a book, it turns out, may have one view when the book is being written and a quite different view when it appears in cold print.

Atlas had Bellow’s cooperation and imagined that the two of them were becoming friends. But the book disappointed Bellow and he did not hide his feelings. In fact, many reviewers found the book ungenerous, riddled with suggestions that Bellow was, author-like, minimizing his appreciation of his contemporaries. Bellow’s admirers were more enthusiastic about Zachary Leader’s The Life of Saul Bellow, published in 2015. Asked to do a biography on the critic Edmund Wilson, Atlas did a little reading and decided he didn’t like Wilson enough to spend a lot of time with him. Apparently, he’s now an ex-biographer.

In length, biographies run from a few sharp pages, like Lytton Strachey’s stylish and influential articles about Victorian England, to Martin Gilbert’s multi-volume Winston S. Churchill. When Gilbert was appointed official biographer, he took it as a licence to build a career around the project. He delivered eight main volumes and 17 volumes of documents. And good for him. Few except the proofreader will get through his entire product but his work is a valuable reference on the greatest man of his century.

Moreover, Gilbert’s careful, detailed, chronological approach can prove illuminating and enjoyable even in its parts. If we choose just one period, such as the early stages of the Second World War, we find Martin putting us at Churchill’s shoulder as events swirl around him and he makes world-shaking decisions. When this kind of intimacy happens, biography becomes a literary art, at once enjoyable and educational, work that we may want to revisit often. It recalls Strachey’s remark that it is as difficult to write a good life as it is to live one.

Boswell’s Life of Johnson is always cited among biographies but it’s not an achievement likely to be duplicated. Boswell knew Johnson and loved being with him. The Johnsonian spirit is the real theme of the book and whenever it appears we share Boswell’s excitement.

It’s admirable but I’m excited more by the detail piled up in books like Ellmann’s Joyce or the two volumes by Edward Mendelson on W.H. Auden. In masterworks like those we immerse ourselves in the progress through life of the subject, the victories and defeats that arouse our emotion. And when that happens, biography can be as stimulating as great literature.